Wonder worker

DURHAM’S wick, like Big Meeting Day. The Market Place has set out its stalls, Silver Street shimmers, Sherburn Hill Salvation Army band plays See Amid the Winter Snow, as very well it might. The Bleak Mid Winter might have been appropriate, too.

There’s a lady dressed as a plum pudding, a gentleman as a turkey (or, possibly, a partridge in a pear tree).

There are, come to think, several other ladies who look like Christmas puddings but only one who may mean to.

Amid the winter snow, too, are a couple of guys whose high-vis jackets identify them as members of the Teesdale Search and Rescue team.

This seems a little over the top until almost stumbling upon the mountains of snow fallen from the high roofs of the Prince Bishops shopping centre onto the mall below. Goodness knows how many may be flattened beneath that lot.

It’s Saturday afternoon, coming in dark, hundreds of lantern-bearing children forming up behind a crush barrier for a St Nicholas parade to the great cathedral.

The barrier is guarded by two very large gentlemen from Durham County Council’s Department of Bouncing and Ancillary Activities.

The lady of this house says that the lanterns are from Ikea, thus dispelling any notion that they may have been the handiwork of Santa’s elves. The photographer’s uncommonly and unfestively querulous, as if auditioning for the part of Grumpy.

“So you want me to go to the cathedral as well,” he says, with the air of a man anxious to be home for the football results and with all the italicised emphasis on the sentence’s final two words.

Too true. That’s where St Nicholas is going to be.

EVERYONE knows, probably, that St Nicholas begat Santa Claus. Fewer may be aware that he was a thaumaturge, but he must have been because it says as much in the Oxford Dictionary of Saints.

That it translates as “wonder worker” helps explain it. He certainly spread wide his largesse.

A fourth century bishop of Myra, in Turkey, Nicholas is the patron saint of prisoners and of perfumiers, of pawnbrokers and of apothecaries, of sailors, unmarried girls and, of course, children.

He is also said to have raised to life three bairns murdered in a brine tub by a butcher.

His feast day is December 6, still much marked in the Low Countries and near enough to last Saturday to encourage the crepuscular cavalcade through Durham.

The Salvation Army band leads them off – by the left, Good King Wenceslas – up past the half-price sales, past the buskers in Santa hats, past… Well, there’s a little lad who doesn’t get past Burger King at all.

Not 200 yards and he’s lured, a victim to temptation. It’s probably not what was intended.

Palace Green is decked with marquees.

Most overflow with Christmas traders; another has a donkey, a sheep and some reindeer, though it’s the stewards who seem red nosed.

At the cathedral door each child has to give up his lantern in exchange for a ticket which, as with St Nic’s three-ball brokers, may later be redeemed.

The Christmas story, of course, is of redemption for all.

THE cathedral’s dimly lit, well filled. St Nicholas appears, white clad and wondrously hirsute, from the direction of the Chapter House. He is unrecognisable as Canon Peter Sinclair, from Darlington.

“We do things very well here,”

says, inarguably, the lady from the chapter office.

St Nicholas is accompanied by a mischievous little girl called Crampus (or something) who dances about with a feather duster and by Elizabeth Baker, the cathedral’s education officer, who leads the service.

We sing carols like Silent Night and Away In A Manger, pray for children who in all manner of ways are less well off, hear again the story of the Bishop of Myra and the three children who were to be sold as slaves because their father couldn’t pay back a money lender.

“It was the law in those days,” says the canny canon.

Nicholas, it’s said, left a gold coin overnight in each of the children’s shoes. The money was taken to their father. The debt was paid.

“Ask God to make us all kind and generous,” says Canon Sinclair.

“Just as St Nicholas was.”

The 20-minute service ends with an invitation to return for any of the cathedral’s many other Christmas services and with Crampus (who bears a marked resemblance to Emily Williamson from the Chorister School and who has promised to be good) helping to give out goldwrapped chocolates to the departing hundreds.

The photographer, who has not only promised to be good but stayed right until the end, gets his reward, too.

The ladies who prepare this page reckon his pictures are tremendous, probably worth 1,000 words. Whatever the thaumaturgency, that’s enough until next week.